The present disclosure relates generally to manufacturing management, and, more particularly, to manufacturing management systems and methods that manage work pieces with various priorities/fabrication velocities.
In product supply, a supply chain supports material purchase, fabrication of materials into intermediate and finished products, and distribution of finished products to clients. Supply chain management has become important in meeting goals of reduced inventory, increased productivity, and enhanced competitiveness. Manufacturing and distribution facilities have limited resources and capacity, however, so not every client request may be met. For example, some requests may be promised but unfulfilled, some clients may experience inadequate supply, and other requests may be rejected. Consequently, effective capacity management in supply chain management, without excess capacity loss, has become important for product suppliers requiring control of manufacture or distribution.
In the supply chain, clients transmit demands to a supplier. Demands may include a request for a particular quantity of a device by a specific date. The supplier forecasts and plans its internal or external manufacturing schedule according to received demands, and allocates capacity for product manufacture to satisfy each client. After receiving orders corresponding to demands from clients, the supplier begins manufacture of the products. Clients sometimes submit pull-in orders, for many reasons, to request that the supplier handling the order to assign it a higher priority. For example, if a client has booked a capacity to fabricate an order of a product in December, but, due to high demand for the product on the market, the client decides to transmit a pull-in order to prioritize the order for delivery in mid-September. The supplier must determine whether to accept the pull-in order. If yes, the supplier promises a reduced cycle time for the corresponding product.
Additionally, on-time delivery is critical to successful supply chain management. As described, if pull-in orders are accepted, other orders are impacted and delayed, making it difficult to provide clients with an exact delivery date. For clients, the uncertainty disrupts transport and inventory planning and management. The situation encourages client pull-in behavior. Since the supplier is unable to deliver the order with a commit date, clients tend to place the pull-in order prior to their original demand to prevent delivery delay. This pull-in behavior can be severely detrimental to the production system because it changes the original demand planning and can cause production disorder when many orders are unexpectedly changed to pull-in status.
Consequently, it is critical to determine whether to accept pull-in orders, and evaluate the impacts of acceptance. There is no model, however, for constructing the relationship between pull-in orders and corresponding impacts, and no mechanism to automatically and systematically control the number of work pieces with various priorities/fabrication velocities. Thus, capacity loss and on-time delivery failure result.